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New FOIA Revelations Highlight NIH’s Role in Covid Messaging

Unearthed emails reveal internal struggles over censorship of dissenting experts.
Silhouette of the US Capitol building with illustrations of virus particles in the sky.

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The new US administration is not preparing to take over after just any four years of the previous one in office: from 2020 until today, there have been a number of serious – and it’s hard to overstate how serious – domestic and international crises.

One of those is the Covid pandemic legacy. Many of the “Covid measures,” it’s long been suspected, were no more than thinly veiled justification to impose all manner of fairly comprehensive online censorship and control.

Now, as reported by Just The News, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests noticed by investigative journalist Jimmy Tobias have unearthed documents that expose the goings-on related to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its early pandemic-era head, Francis Collins.

Screenshot of a tweet by Jimmy Tobias discussing a new NIH FOIA release, featuring partially redacted email exchanges related to the review of a manuscript on gain-of-function research.

Collins and his close associates are said to have censored doctors, including Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya who was opposed to lockdowns – the same Bhattacharya who has the potential to become the new NIH director.

In the meanwhile, Tobias published his findings that named NIS principal deputy director under Collins, Lawrence Tabak, who showed up before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic not long ago.

NIH, it’s worth noting, is the US government agency that in 2015 funded China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology research into the original “Covid” (Sars-Cov-1). The first outbreak of that happened in 2002-2004, and ten years later – it (and the vaccine against it) was still being researched.

Then, “miraculously” Sars-Cov-2 (the Covid we all know) came almost as quickly as the vaccine. But the question remains, where did that virus actually come from? The Wuhan lab may have leaked it as it manipulated the original one – that’s one of the theories.

Tabak was willing to discuss “a manuscript on gain-of-function (genetic alteration) research in light of the COVID-19 pandemic co-authored by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences bioethicist David Resnik, who allegedly asked for then-Science Policy Director and Chief of Staff Carrie Wolinetz to review it,” a report said.

But then Wolinetz, in communication with Tabak, branded the manuscript as suggesting “parity between unsubstantiated manmade and/or laboratory origin theories and peer-reviewed studies which provide scientific evidence that the virus is of natural origin” – as a bid to tie the lab-leak theory to the NIH funding, and that allegedly being the only reason for such interpretations.

Wolinetz was also worried about the messaging of it all – “the notion that an NIH employee would be providing what amounts to critiques of HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services) policy that is implemented by NIH, or suggestions that contradict messaging by NIH leadership, in this type of article.”

The manuscript only got published over three years later – and over a year into Wolinetz stepping down as Tabak’s senior adviser.

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